The Bird Catcher's Apprentice
by lastpaperbender
Summary: Based on Mozart's opera "Die Zauberflöte" ("The Magic Flute"), retold from Papageno's POV, in a more serious light. Please R


The boy lay motionless, his dark, wild curls tangled up in the red, dry pine needles his head rested in. His body seemed spread to fill all the hollows of the ground beneath him, and his black, quick eyes were fixed on something in the trees above him—a dull, plain little sparrow that darted along a limb, never still. They were two of a kind, the bird and the boy: small, dusky creatures, fed on seed and air. Here in the dark and fragrant strand of pines and fir trees, they shared the communion of two wild things at peace.  
  
A faint, knowing smile crossed the boy's lips as he heard a twig crack nearby; the sparrow took to flight, startled.  
  
"Pa-pa-geno!" someone lilted behind him.  
  
He sat up, a long-suffering but affectionate expression on his face as a young woman emerged from the scrub, a short bow and quiver of arrows slung carelessly over one shoulder. Pamina had given him the name when they were children together, after the sound he used to call birds to him. She drew close, and reached out a rosy-pale hand to brush the needles from his hair. He allowed her hand to linger there for a moment, then pulled his head away.  
  
"Pa-pa-geno," she sang again, and sat down beside him. Pamina had her mother's dark, silken hair, but that was all she had inherited from the Queen of Tor Alte. Her delicate, heart-shaped face tilted up as she looked over at her old friend. "What are you doing out here, Jaan?" she asked.  
  
"Watching. Waiting," he answered tersely. He nodded towards a knot in one tall pine tree. "A nightingale made her nest there. Your mother wants one."   
  
The girl's dark brows furled with thought. She had known Jaan first as the apprentice of Raulf, her mother's bird catcher—Queen Adelheid had a fascination for all flying things that matched the boy's own, and had quietly fostered Jaan's companionship with her daughter over the years. During a prosperous and lazy summer in Tor Alte, it was not unusual to find the Queen speaking in low towns with the bird catcher in the yard of his cottage; she would regally bend over the neck of her placid gray palfrey, while the lanky, ropy-muscled Raulf would lean on his birdcage, woven from young saplings. There was a curious relationship between them—not between queen and subject, but between a man and woman grown gray with time, for whom the greatest pleasure was to sit in the warm sun and talk things past and yet to come. It was much like the kinship which Pamina and her "Papageno" had found growing between them.  
  
Jaan's dark, fey eyes were again on the nightingale's nest. He drummed his fingers for a moment against his shin—a sure sign, Pamina knew, that he was in the middle of some quick thought—then was on his feet and moving toward the pine tree. He scrambled up the truck with a rough, boyish grace, then with a delicacy most would never have guessed of him, plucked out one of the fragile, warm eggs and slid back down. The girl stood up, eager to watch what he was doing; he came back, and held out his cupped hand to her. She gave him an exasperated look when he did not unfurl his fingers, and carefully peeled the digits back to see the tiny, mottled oval.  
  
"What will you do with it now?" she whispered, almost afraid to speak loudly over the egg lest the sound over her voice should break the thin shell.  
  
"Bring it to Raulf," he answered, tucking the nightingale's egg into his breast pocket. "He knows how to hatch them."  
  
Before she could answer, he was away and gone, leaping over the brush and stones that littered the forest floor. Pamina watched him for a moment—if it was anyone other than Jaan, she would have feared for the safety of the egg. But the boy was too much of a wild thing himself to let any harm come to his kin, the creatures of the forest. She snatched up her bow and quiver from the bed of pine needles, and turned to follow him, when a faint movement in the brush drew her eye.  
  
The girl froze, rooted to the spot, as the strange woman's gaze held her own. Jaan had gone on ahead, out of Pamina's sight. The slight, wild-looking woman ran cool eyes over the girl—they had both seen each other before. Pamina felt her limbs tremble; her mother had met once with three such women. The girl did not know why the Queen had called the three women to her, for her nurse had been quick to seize her and take her from the room, but one of them had glanced her way, and cast that same, penetrating gaze upon her.  
  
The tiny, strange woman raised her hand in greeting; Pamina felt it as a release—she broke from the spot, and ran the way Jaan had gone. 


End file.
